saint
Martyrs Terence, Pompeius, and their Companions of Africa
Seven Christians of Carthage who under Decius were offered every stratagem to induce their apostasy and rejected each in turn; all seven were beheaded together in the city's amphitheater.
Life
Terence, Pompeius, Africanus, Maximus, Zenon, Alexander, and Theodore were seven Christians of Carthage in North Africa during the persecution of Decius (around 250–251). They had been arrested together at a small gathering for the Liturgy in the catacombs outside the city and brought before the proconsul Fortunatianus for examination.
The proconsul applied to them in turn a sequence of inducements and torments calculated to break them: the offers of freedom and high office, the rack, scourging, hot irons, and the bowels of wild beasts. None yielded. After many days of the same treatment, Fortunatianus — by the synaxarion's account, secretly impressed by their constancy but constrained by the imperial policy — ordered them all beheaded in the amphitheater of Carthage.
Their relics were honored in the city through the Christian centuries that followed and were translated in part to Constantinople in the medieval period. Their joint feast falls on April 10.
Traditions
Feast day
April 10
Topics
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